116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)

[Music] Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic of it linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and I'm Lauren Goen, and today, we're getting enthusiastic about understanding aliens' fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all other human cultures. But first, we've been doing a bit of spring cleaning on our website. There are kind of a lot of Lingthusiasm episodes by now, and we have deliberately made them so they can be listened to in any order that strikes your fancy. But that means that if you're trying to do something a little bit more systematic, it can be hard to figure out what to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. So we've added some new topic categories that you can browse. For example, which episodes analyze the linguistics elements of all the science section fantasy that we've been reading? And we've kept my favorite part of the topics page, which is the ability to browse episodes via linguistic structural feature, which is perfect for when I'm looking for an episode to pair with the subject I'm teaching this time. You can also see a starter pack of episodes we think are especially good to try to get your friends into Lingthusiasm with, all our interviews and book-related episodes grouped together and more categories. Go to Lingthusiasm.com/topics or find this under the episode section of our website. Our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms and how they work linguistically. It's a real barrel of laughs. It'll pass muster. It'll bring the house down. Heads will roll. Well, wait, that sounds bad. Okay, maybe we'll put that cat back in the bag. This episode also has a swear warning because we finally explored why linguists are so keen on the idiom, the stuff hit the fan. To get access to the idioms episode and over nine years of Lingthusiasm bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm. Lauren, some days do you ever just want a can at all and become a linguist on a spaceship? Oh yeah. I mean, sometimes the space linguist is more like an interpreter or they're very good at just wrangling the translation machines. But what I love are those episodes of Star Trek where Hura or Hoshi have a gap in the system and they need to figure out what's happening in order to communicate. We recently got a great book recommendation from a listener, shout out to Trish B, who asked us on Blue Sky whether we'd read Hellsburg by Janet Kagan and said it was a science fiction murder mystery and one of your top four books ever. Also shout out to the four other people who immediately replied and said they also loved this book, a book we'd never heard of. With endorsements like that, I had to read it and I can tell you it was great and we are going to structural episode around it. And if those initial endorsements weren't enough, you told me that was a bunch of gestures stuff in it and so I had to read it. So let's start with the basic premise of Hellsburg. We're not assuming anyone else has read it. Yeah so I guess it's a murder mystery. I honestly forgot about the murder mystery part. To me this book was really about cross-cultural communication. So we're on a planet and there's a survey crew of humans trying to figure whether this alien species, which I pictured is sort of looking like an emu, is capable of intelligent communication. We have a whole episode on communicating with aliens who have completely different ways of doing language but this episode isn't about trying to communicate with the emu aliens. Instead, the thing that's very enticing about this particular book is the survey crew of humans, which is made up of this really diverse set of cultures. They deliberately recruit people from different human cultures to expand the, I guess the range of how useful they'll be in interacting with aliens. But the ironic thing is for a deliberately recruited and trained cross-cultural group is they are so bad at cross-cultural communication. Yeah and then this is one character who arrives who's a Hellspark, who's basically from this culture where their whole deal is cross-cultural communication. Is it Hellspark or Hellspark? Yeah. This book has really fun language play in that this is a deliberate joke that's overtly discussed in the book. It could be either Hellspark or Hellspark and the Hellspark humans seem to play this up for their own amusement and like consistently alternate their pronunciation. And like random fluctuation is absolutely how human languages work. Being incredibly consistent about AB, AB, AB is not really how human communication works. So that's a fun little detail that makes it sort of more alien to me. But the thing that made we want your take on this book the most Lauren was that the cross-cultural miscommunication was a lot about how people interact with each other in physical space, not just outer space. So like how people sit with respect to each other in a room or how close they stand in conversation. And the term that this book uses for this phenomenon is Proximix, which looks sort of familiar to me from linguistics terms like Morphine and Phoneme. But a Proxim isn't a word I'd ever heard before. This seems not exactly gesture but kind of like gesture. Have you heard of Proximix? Is it a real thing in linguistics somewhere? Yeah. Figuring out what is polite or comfortable in terms of how close you can physically stand new people, how you face each other or don't face each other in conversation is absolutely part of the larger way that we structure interacting with people. And it is a real piece of communication terminology that she's taken into the book which I love. And I've definitely experienced the feeling of like having a conversation with someone who's continually advancing on me because their personal bubble is smaller than mine or they're standing awkwardly distantly away from me because my personal bubble is smaller than theirs. So it felt very real that like, oh, this is great. Someone has actually studied this. Yeah. And you might also interact with someone who really enjoys sitting side by side and not making eye contact or you might have people who really prefer their conversations to be really front onto each other. There's lots of ways we can arrange ourselves in space. And a lot of this has been looked at in the kind of cultural anthropology literature. And so I knew about this term but Janet Kagan specifically gives a shout out and like I love it when authors do this to an anthropologist who specifically coined the concept of proxy mix Edward T Hall who is someone I hadn't really read before and went down a little Edward T Hall rabbit hole a rabbit hole. That's a joke that only works in your accent out loud. I loved the author's note at the end. Janet Kagan alas is no longer with us this book came out in the 80s. So what we do have her author's note at the end where she's like, yeah, I was very influenced by Edward T Hall. Proxy mix comes from this real literature and I was like, yes, Lauren, do you know this literature? What does hall say about proxy mix? So he was really interested in like a really expansive idea of proxy mix. So he was interested in face-to-face communication but also how people structured like the physical built environment. So he hung out with architects as much as anthropologists and linguists. He had this really expansive view and he had this real sense of there being this really strong cross-cultural variation. So he trained as an anthropologist in the United States of America. He worked in a number of Native American communities and then in World War II he served in the US Army in Europe and the Philippines. He's kind of known for noticing a few things that vary across cultures, whether that's the way people relate to each other in space, the way different cultures relate to time and concepts like punctuality. And he also talks a lot about how we can take a structural approach to researching these differences. And then by making those differences more apparent, we can learn them and try to overcome them as we interact across cultures. Which if anyone's read one of those like how to do business type books, this is such a common trope now that we need to understand people from different cultures. But in the second half of the 20th century, this became like a new thing to consider and actively study. So this is the guy that sort of predates the like what I think of as sort of the tired business cliche about the Japanese. But he's predating that and sort of coming up with this stuff. It wasn't as cliche when he was observing it. Yeah, he has a book called Hidden Differences doing business with the Japanese in the kind of post-war US-Japan trade relationship. Where you had these two very different cultures and people trying to conduct business. This whole trope kind of started with this military trained anthropologist who then spent a lot of time working with the United States Foreign Service Institute training diplomats and then subsequently training business people. And I feel like maybe there was less like global popular culture or this idea that maybe like western people may have watched some anime or a movie. read some manga or like less of this sort of overlap so that maybe some of the stuff was like less familiar at the time We take how much different cultures and and kind of the general population from different cultures get to Interact thanks to modern transportation and modern aeroplanes And so yeah, this was really fulfilling that It is wonderful and the other thing that I really appreciate about Edward T. Hall is that a lot of his writing was for A general audience and I can absolutely see my Janet Keegan would have read his books and just been able to Really be inspired for them because he really did this great Accessible writing in the late 50s through to the 1990s Perhaps one thing that has shifted from that earlier work to today Is that it was really predicated on this is how all American English speakers Stand when they're talking to each other or this is how all American English speakers Think about punctuality and timeliness when it comes to meeting people and then it's like now we will discuss the Japanese Everyone in the Philippines. I don't want a brag here Lauren, but I've known quite a few Americans in my time And what I would say is they have differing approaches to punctuality depending on themselves as individuals And presumably this is also true for Japanese people of whom I'm known several but not quite as many as Americans So you are definitely zeroing in on one of the I think challenges and limitations and a lot of his work At a very high level you may be inclined to be like, oh, yes There must be differences here and when you zero in it becomes a lot harder to Actually pin down those differences. I was thinking about this when Reading Hellspark because I've definitely experienced these sorts of communication breakdowns that are described in the book like there's a few Examples of like oh this person is accidentally approaching this other person from the direction that leads into you perceive as a threat rather than as a friend Mm-hmm or that this one person is from this culture where they were really elaborately painted like toenails and things like that another person is from a culture where the feet are very taboo and need to be covered all the time And so they're sort of in this tension and I was thinking about a time when I was talking with someone in a professional context and this woman kept like touching my thigh in A way that I am not typically familiar with being in a professional context like she wasn't flirting with me It was just a like we're having an engaged professional conversation the way that I'm gonna demonstrate that is That I'm gonna do this. Were you like seated really close to each other? We were seated on sort of the same bench, right? So like she didn't have to reach around a table like that would have been kind of awkward Yeah, but she was just sort of engaged and the way that some people might touch your arm I think you might have started with the arm and like kept going with the thigh and You know, but she was like my mom's age like there wasn't the dynamic that I just want to double check She wasn't flirting with you. That's not the vibe you got. I really that was not anything about the rest of the vibe that I got and Eventually I was like okay, well, I guess if we're in touching thighs shows that we're engaging culture I'll do this back because maybe you also like this and so I did it back even though I wouldn't normally do so there I'm passing like the Hellspark test of like can I adjust my behavior on the fly? And and she seemed quite engaged and we did not go in a date She did not interpret this as me flirting back. It was just like oh, we're having this engaged conversation and Yet nothing about this person's particular background. I have met other people from her background and they were not In veteran thigh touchers. So I Can't say that this was this was a cultural difference at some level But it wasn't a cultural difference in this sort of reductive like oh she's from a certain place like she must be doing it in this particular context Yeah, but it's also a really good illustrator of how often we Arrange ourselves in relation to other people in a really not conscious way like She was just like we're having a friendly conversation. This wasn't alike This is a professional but friendly relationship and so I'm going to move into the five centimeters zone instead of the 20 centimeters Own that I would stay in for a professional but non-friendly conversation Yeah, she's not doing that consciously. No, and I was doing a certain amount of it consciously where I was like Oh, I guess this is what we're doing. I will mirror back to you whatever you're doing. Yeah, so I do think that people potentially have the ability to adjust our behavior on the fly more to each other than this I want to emphasize science fictional book that is deliberately exaggerating a fictional premise, right? Not to critique this science fiction book for viewing science fiction the characters do display a Remarkable lack of insight, but we've all possibly bigger as well Like it's very obvious when your cultural norms are being infringed on without necessarily being aware of when other people being infringed and That sometimes what you need to do in response isn't as clear as Reciprocly also touching someone's thigh sometimes it's like oh, I need to not approach this person from the left Which like I'm not going to know if some culture has left approachment taboo's. Yeah, I do have to say I just love how much this health box character really just felt like a Avatar for this concept from anthropology, but also how much She absolutely just feels like wish fulfillment for anyone who has been in a social situation where they are second-guessing how they should Interact with people definitely a wish fulfillment character for socially awkward people They're like oh, what if I could just decode and perfectly replicate other people's body language and then we would totally all get along with everyone Be my friend That was great and very much treated as a this is a fixed code So as soon as I am exactly the distance away from someone that their cultural script expects They will immediately start being relaxed around me and they won't know why I just like I don't think it would be nice If proxy makes existed in this like strict almost like grammatical way But I don't think they do and none of the other people were sort of bicultural or Culturally fluid at all like they've been on this planet for so long with sometimes no one else or Only one other person from their culture and they haven't adapted to each other's norms at all And yet they're immediately able to do that as soon as someone points out to them like why they need proxy mix and and what to do overtly and that they weren't doing any of that adaptation like spontaneously it's I Love when a very specific Academic concept is just sort of taken all the way to its full extreme in a fictional context particularly when it's a theory I haven't encountered before I Wish more people would run with concepts like this and sort of take inspiration from specific academic concepts Is it the very unsuptal point where I point out we have a whole episode about the superior worth theory of linguistic relativity and How much it pops up in science fiction and other genre? Yeah, and so many people have already done say be worth pick a new theory to take to its extreme Please like this is why this was so great. Yeah, and Side side your academic sources. We love it and even if those academic sources get more discredited later than they were in the 80s when the book was written It's still a fascinating introduction to the academic topic that introduced me to something the vibe I got from anthropologists is that like whole is very much a product of his time and he had some interesting ideas and certainly Is considered to be one of the fathers of the field of intercultural communication Which is now a massive area across linguistics and anthropology. I couldn't find anything particularly dubious about him beyond your usual white guy in the middle of the 20th century But intercultural communication has definitely moved on to be a lot more nuanced as has anthropology I got to go to the Canadian Anthropology Society conference last year when it happened to be in Montreal and Very much noticed this like oh, we're gonna consider this one particular culture on its own terms We're gonna get someone else is gonna consider this other particular culture. I remember a fun presentation about someone doing anthropology on the roles and Inactions of people playing a D&D game So like a role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons and how the players enact specific character roles or like the saying that they're going to do something is Effectively the doing of it because you're you're doing this imagination thing You're not doing like a larp where you're actually like physically having the sword fight and just to be clear that D&D game wasn't being used as Representative of the entirety of North America or Canada or even West Coast anglosphere Canadians or even all D&D players It was really being considered as an example of what these particular players were doing and what maybe has Visibility to other players of role playing games, but not exactly as avatars for their entire culture the way that like Oh, we analyzed a few business then in a boardroom and now their avatar's for their entire culture was sort of the initial trap This was falling into yeah, and you see this a lot more with studies in anthropology or in linguistics You're looking at a much more specific community of people rather than this whole the entirety of Japan or Everyone in North America does this and I will say that there's been some more sort of Specifically grounded in particular fictional communities types of science fiction in the 80s as well and thinking of Ursula K. Ligwins always coming home Which is very much like written from the point of view of an anthropologist in particular community and has this very Rich description of that one particular community But I also feel like I've been seeing this in some recent fiction as well that I want to talk about in in conversation with this. Oh, excellent. Does this mean we can talk about what we are seeking by Cameron Raid? I really enjoyed what we are seeking and made you read it. And I think it's got some really fun parallels to Hellsburg. It's also set on a planet where some people have been trying to figure out how to communicate with some aliens. These aliens are more like free roaming cactus people rather than hyper-intelligent emuse. Yes, indeed. But the thing that I found most compelling again was the communication between different cultures of humans again. And the viewpoint character is coming from a culture that views the broader settler community as in Thrall to a barbaric custom called marriage. Instead is coming from a cultural background that reminded me of the a group of people called the Mosul in China who have this type of matrilineal household structure where women can have lovers but ultimately the children are raised by the mother and the mother's brothers and the fatherhood the fathers are involved in raising the children of their own sisters. So there's less of a like it's not a it's not a patriarchy or a patriarchy or a trillineal society or organized around a marriage it's organized around a matriarch and her daughters and her son and the children of those daughters. And so this culturally isolated man who is in this fictional world is kind of trying to navigate this society where he doesn't have his matrilineal house that he's affiliated to because he's in this new environment and all of the cultural challenges for him that spill out from that. I will say as a classic sci-fi trope Cameron Raid has done this great thing where she's taken the absolute tiniest kernel of like matrilineal household and then just dialed everything up to like 20. Right so I don't want to say that this is at all like an accurate reflection of what the Mosul are like just that there is a real world culture that is at some level provides a germ of yeah where this science fictional concept is really taking something and running with the implications in a direction that enriches the story rather than trying to be sort of grounded in that one culture. And I think it's a really important development in a lot of the most interesting recent science fiction and fantasy that does this is that you're coming from the perspective of that cultural outsider rather than a book like Hellspark where that character is very North America coded or very like anglacy a coded right and the Hellspark character is very much like the cultural insider yeah who's the insider to all of the cultures rather than having her own particular point of view that's finding everything else just as unfamiliar and I think another recent book that does this in a different way is to shape a dragon's breath by moniquil black goose is on my reading list my entire recommendations list is pretty much made up of things that Gretchen recommends to me. Haha look I know you've at less time than to read than me and I want to make sure you only read the best I appreciate your curation so this one is set on earth in an alternate history where there's a young indigenous girl in colonial America who like bonds with a dragon also there's dragons. Well there are highly sentient or pegged to us intelligence. Well the author in an interview points out that the dragons aren't sort of people they're sorts of animals so they have this emotional bond with people and you can tell them to do things like go there the way you could with like a dog that you're bonded to but it's not that they like some dragons in some context are really like they communicate in full sentences and that's not what the dragons are doing in this okay particular story but there's still this sort of other that makes the plot happen where the humans are interacting in particular levels yeah so this main character who's from a community in southern New England sort of Rhode Island Massachusetts area and speaks in Algonquin language has to go to a colonial boarding school in order to learn how to train her dragon quote unquote properly so it doesn't get taken from her by the colonial authority and so you get this indigenous perspective on the colonialism but as a way of making that colonial world feel just as unfamiliar to the reader as it does to the protagonist this is an old history where basically the Roman Empire and Christianity never happened huh so who is our European hegemon then well there's still from the island of Britain but they are sort of like the dain law happened the whole way through so they're sort of influenced by a Viking culture into England and like all of the names for like chemistry and stuff that she's learning are based on this sort of like anguish anglosaxon roots rather than Latin it and Greek terminology so we also get that feeling of like being a bit of a cultural outsider exactly and so you get that sort of double leveled outsiderness and coming to understand the other people who are also in various ways outside her from this society and how they form alliances and what they're trying to do in the world so how does this tie into the other books we've been talking about I think that it's more specifically grounded in a particular culture although she I checked some interviews with moniquil black goose to see if she intended it the protagonist to be from a specific existing indigenous culture or one that was sort of influenced by her own background but wasn't a specific named one and it was definitely more the second one she says a lot of the time was weird for me because I'm from Rhode Island and the Elgonquin language kind of seeps into the things that are named so it's got this sort of influence but it's not intended to be I think a one-to-one mapping because it is this you know fantasy setting yeah but that's sort of going one step further in terms of being grounded in the very specific sense of place and people and relationships that's also showing cultural differences what she says in an interview is that one of her goals was to get readers to comprehend how fundamentally different the European or colonialist perceptions of the world are from the indigenous perceptions and so I think it fits with this theme of cross-cultural communication and putting characters into friction as a way of having readers inhabit different kinds of ways of being in the world one of the reasons I'm excited to get to this book on my reading list is because it makes overt this theme of like people coming into a space that's not theirs and this kind of colonizer frontier theme overt in the way that it's not in a lot of non-fiction history and the kind of fiction of meeting aliens or new peoples yeah when we were researching this episode I came across a post on the reactor website by Joe Welton who's a friend of the podcast called a wish for something different at the frontier which is about how there's actually quite a lot of books that are somewhat like the books we've been talking about where you have a tiny group of humans on a planet trying to figure out whether they can communicate with the aliens and eventually arriving at something that resembles greater understanding and how those books are influenced by the sort of American frontier colonial history but with the indigenous people cast in the role of aliens and so to have a book that's saying no this is explicitly about an indigenous worldview is I think interestingly in conversation with that broader history within the genre. Hellspark and what we are seeking and to shape a dragon's breath all have these big looming alien unknown presences and finding these out and discovering more throughout the narrative is what is the the kind of big driving plot but what really drives things forward and what really helps us see these characters is the way they relate to other humans from different coaches and I think one of the things that draws people to linguistics and also to anthropology is this desire that if we could analyze the systems and the people that are around us more closely and with more engaged and curious attention we might ultimately be able to communicate with each other more deeply and more respectfully and in a way that shows how much we truly want to appreciate and get to know each other. For more link theosism and links to all things mentioned in this episode and to vastly expand your reading list go to linkthesiasm.com you can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or linkthesiasm.com you can get transcripts of every episode on linkthesiasm.com/transcripts and you can follow @linkthesiasm on all the social media sites you can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the international phonetic alphabet branching tree diagrams booban kiki and our favorite esoteric unit code symbols plus other link thesiasm merch like the very upper pro not judging your grammar just analyzing it bags and notebooks at linkthesiasm.com/merch I can be found at GretchenMcCallic.com. I'm on social media as GretchenMcCallic.com on Blue Sky, at Gretchen.McCallic on Instagram. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. - My social media and blog is superlingual. 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If you can recommend Linkthusiasm to anyone in your life who's curious about language, or leave us a nice review, like this one from Not Charizard, who said, "I really like, and this sounds obvious given the name. "How enthusiastic the presenters are. "It makes me so happy when they get excited "about what they're talking about "because it makes me get very enthusiastic too. "I also really like how they don't assume a lot of knowledge "so I can understand what they're talking about "because they always explain." - Linkthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gorn. As a near producer is Cleggorn, our editorial producer is Sarah Dupier-Rilla, our production assistant is Martha Tutsui-Billens, our editorial assistant is John Crook, and our technical editor is Leah Velman, our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. - Stalingthusiasm. (upbeat music)